Talking to Mom about Politics
May. 13th, 2008 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsMom called while Kouryou-chan and I were at Starbucks.
We had taken a bike ride Sunday afternoon, just a quick jaunt up the street to the only intersection in our part of town with anything at all, in this case a Starbucks, a video store, a grocery store (with another Starbucks inside it), and an independent pharmacy. We went to the Starbucks where she got a chocolate oat bar and I got a coffee. It was surprisingly cold outside for the time of year, and it even drizzled a little.
I had called her earlier in the day to wish her a happy Mother's day, and she was calling me back. She seems to have gotten the impression (one apparently shared by a number of friends of ours) that being parents on top of our geekiness and businesses has made us so overwhelmed that we don't have time for socializing. She angsted and anguished about how neither Steve or Sandra (my siblings) had called her.
I mentioned my recent little election cycle job I had done, and Mom asked me who I was going to vote for. Once I'd clarified that she meant the general election, she said, "I don't think I could vote for Obama. It's so weird. He came out of nowhere, didn't he? And he's so convincing, so charismatic. It's like it's a cult. It's a movement, that's what it is, it's a movement." She went on this track for a while.
C'mon, Mom, we both know what it is: he's black. That's all there is to it. She doesn't like McCain much, and she wishes she could vote for Hillary. I spoke to her about Obama's actual record, his history in Chicago, how absolutely everything about him was available on-line at his website or reputable news outlets, and yeah, I'd actually read his foreign policy proposals and found it a lot more admirable than Hillary's or McCain's. I love Mom very much, but there are times when I'm grateful I'm not actually related to her.
We had taken a bike ride Sunday afternoon, just a quick jaunt up the street to the only intersection in our part of town with anything at all, in this case a Starbucks, a video store, a grocery store (with another Starbucks inside it), and an independent pharmacy. We went to the Starbucks where she got a chocolate oat bar and I got a coffee. It was surprisingly cold outside for the time of year, and it even drizzled a little.
I had called her earlier in the day to wish her a happy Mother's day, and she was calling me back. She seems to have gotten the impression (one apparently shared by a number of friends of ours) that being parents on top of our geekiness and businesses has made us so overwhelmed that we don't have time for socializing. She angsted and anguished about how neither Steve or Sandra (my siblings) had called her.
I mentioned my recent little election cycle job I had done, and Mom asked me who I was going to vote for. Once I'd clarified that she meant the general election, she said, "I don't think I could vote for Obama. It's so weird. He came out of nowhere, didn't he? And he's so convincing, so charismatic. It's like it's a cult. It's a movement, that's what it is, it's a movement." She went on this track for a while.
C'mon, Mom, we both know what it is: he's black. That's all there is to it. She doesn't like McCain much, and she wishes she could vote for Hillary. I spoke to her about Obama's actual record, his history in Chicago, how absolutely everything about him was available on-line at his website or reputable news outlets, and yeah, I'd actually read his foreign policy proposals and found it a lot more admirable than Hillary's or McCain's. I love Mom very much, but there are times when I'm grateful I'm not actually related to her.
